23. Anniversary
ANNIVERSARY
LUCY
Our anniversary is in a week.
It’s been nearly two years since we said our vows in front of a judge in a courthouse, which I thought was one thing, and it turned out to be another, and now I cannot let this day pass without telling him the truth.
It is time.
I know it the way I know most things—before I can explain how, fully formed, arriving in the night and still there in the morning.
I have been carrying this lie for weeks now. It served its purpose, and I am not sorry I did it, but now….
Lies have a natural lifespan; this one has reached its end, and carrying it any further isn’t strategy—it’s dishonesty. A lie I’m telling a man I’m not sure I can leave.
Which is the other thing!
The thing I have been not saying—louder than everything else.
I am not sure I can leave.
I am not sure I want to.
And I do not know what to do with that, because the woman who stood in the hallway outside the conference room—who heard every word, who drove home holding back her tears, who made lamb ragu she had no appetite for and said she wanted out of this marriage—that woman had very good reasons.
Those reasons have not disappeared, and I do not want to be the person who forgets them because a man was kind to her for six weeks and danced with her in her parents’ backyard.
I have been that person before.
I know what it costs.
He tells me two days before our anniversary that he has planned something and not to make other arrangements.
I look at him over coffee.
“Something special?” I ask, which is my performance, which now sits badly in my mouth.
“Of course.” He grins. “I’m told it’s a significant occasion.”
He says it with the dry, quiet humor that he does not always deploy but which, when it appears, has always been the version of him I find most—
I stop the thought.
I finish my coffee. “What kind of special?”
“The kind you’ll like.”
“That’s not information.”
“It’s all you’re getting.”
I look at him. He looks back.
The morning light is doing something unreasonable to his face, which it has been doing with increasing frequency, and I am less and less interested in being reasonable about it.
“Okay.”
He smiles. He looks unfairly attractive.
That’s the other-other thing.
I want him.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult at night to sleep next to him and not have him.
We had a healthy sex life. We made love nearly every day. And we made love not just in bed but in other places, whenever we felt like it.
Now that I can walk and talk and move without pain, I want him over and under me.
Fox has excellent hands, and he knows how to use them.
He also knows how to use his tongue and other parts of his body.
Lucy, you’re just horny, girl!
He takes me to the Frist.
“You told me once that you wanted to study art before deciding on culinary school,” he explains as he holds my hand and walks to the entrance of the art museum.
I did tell him that. In passing, at one of those Sunday dinners, when his mother was holding court about a Rubens she’d bought at auction—The Three Graces.
“It’s a meditation on feminine virtue,” she announced, with the confidence of a woman who has never been corrected in her own dining room.
I looked up from my plate.
“It’s actually considered a celebration of sensuality.” The words were out before I could stop them.
The table went quiet.
Margaret raised both eyebrows in that mistress-to-servant way—tacitly asking how dare I speak, and that got my back up, so I continued, out of pettiness and a need to show her up.
“Rubens painted full-figured women because he thought that was the ideal female form. It’s essentially the opposite of virtue in the restrained sense—it’s abundance. Pleasure. The body as something to be enjoyed.”
“Oh, who cares why he painted what he painted. I just think it’s an excellent investment. Art always is.” David raised his glass with just enough sneer and snobbery.
Thankfully, after that, the family started to talk about investments and not art.
On our way home, Fox brought it up. “I didn’t know you knew so much about art.” His tone carried both surprise and recognition, as if he’d turned over a stone and found an entire world beneath.
“I almost studied art history,” I said, almost carelessly. “Before culinary school.”
He didn’t probe the matter, and I forgot about it by the time we got home.
Apparently, he didn’t.
We indulge in art for two hours.
The building earns the first few minutes on its own—white marble and Art Deco. Stone eagles over the doors. Fluted pilasters. The bones of a post office that someone decided must have higher ambitions.
“It used to be the main post office,” I tell him, a little thrilled to be coming here after a very long time.
“I know. I read up on it.”
Of course he did!
Fox has always been careful—but this Fox, this new husband I seem to have acquired, is being intentional and thoughtful with me. It’s enough to make a girl feel very special.
Inside, there is an Impressionist exhibition.
Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin—the whole inheritance of light and color and the argument, made in paint, that feeling is a legitimate subject for art.
I stop in front of a small Monet water study early on and don’t move for a while. It’s the kind of painting where the surface of the water and the reflection of the sky become indistinguishable from each other—where you genuinely cannot tell what is real and what is only the image of real.
“He kept painting water his whole life,” I muse. “Hundreds of times. The same subject.”
Fox slides his arm around me.
He does that a lot.
Touches me.
Kisses me.
Never crosses the line.
Drives me insane with longing.
He circles his thumb on my bare arm. “Why do you think he did that?”
I think about it, which isn’t easy, mind you, with his hands on me. “Maybe because water is never the same twice.”
Fox looks at the painting and nods pensively. “Water holds light differently every moment, and you can never actually catch it; you can only approximate it, but maybe he wanted to catch it, and the only way to do it was to paint it in different ways.”
It’s a remarkable thing that Fox keeps surprising me. I lean into him and smile. “That’s very insightful.”
“What can I say, I’m an insightful sort of guy.” He kisses my hair.
In the next room, we’re enchanted by a Van Gogh.
They don’t have his famous ones, but when an artist is as good as Vincent, he could paint on tissue paper, and it would be museum-worthy.
We stand in front of a painting of a field, the sky typical of Van Gogh, alive even when still.
“I’ve always thought he painted with the verve of a man who sees the world in a most unique way.” Fox rubs his hand up and down my arm.
I suppress a moan.
I have a feeling he knows what he’s doing.
I look up at him, and he smiles pleasantly at me. “What?”
I bite my lower lip. His eyes darken, become hungry. He leans down and kisses me, slow, soft, deep.
I don’t suppress my moan this time.
Someone coughs around us, and we pull away like teenagers caught necking in the backseat of a car.
I giggle.
He grins cheekily.
For lunch, he takes me to East Nashville.
Not a Bennett family-type restaurant. No white tablecloth, no snooty ma?tre d’, no performance of expense.
Margot, on Woodland Street, has brick walls, an open kitchen, and customers who are locals who’ve been coming here for twenty years and will continue to do so for another twenty.
The room smells like browning butter and something slow-cooked. The cornbread arrives in a cast-iron skillet.
I pick up the menu, and I do not put it down for a while.
“It’s a seasonal menu,” I gush.
Fox strokes my cheek with a finger. “Like Dina’s. Like what you do.”
We order, and I tell him that I’m ready to go back to work.
“Let’s talk to Dr. Reyes and take it from there,” he evades.
“Fox, I’m going nuts doing nothing.”
“But you look so cute going nuts,” he teases and kisses my nose.
The owner moves through the room the way good restaurateurs do—unhurried, stopping at tables not to perform hospitality but because she is genuinely curious about how things are landing.
She crouches to talk to an older couple about the fish.
She debates the merits of the pork shoulder with a table of four who clearly come here often.
She refills someone’s water herself because she’s passing and it needs to be done.
She arrives at our table and looks at me. “First time here?”
“Yes,” I say. “I love how versatile your menu is.”
“Thank you. We want to buy local, so we change with the seasons.”
“My wife is a chef, too,” Fox interjects. “She’s a stickler for having a menu that moves with the calendar.”
“Really?” She pulls out the chair across from me and next to Fox. She takes a seat. “Where do you work?”
“Dina’s. Over on—“
“Dina’s.” Her face changes entirely. “On McFerrin?”
“That’s the one.”
“I’ve been there.” She leans forward. “Those crêpes. With the bourbon caramel and the—what is that, a brown butter crème?”
I flush. “Oh…thank you.”
We talk for a moment about food and the challenges of being a chef these days, and I realize this may be the first time Fox is participating in this way in my world.
I always got the feeling that he didn’t like that I cooked at a diner. He wanted something more posh for me. More Bennett-like.
It feels good to know that he appreciates what I do, understands why I work at Dina’s, and…is proud of me. I feel seen by him in a way I haven’t in a long time.
After lunch, we walk, because East Nashville is good for walking.
Its streets are the width of streets that were not designed for traffic as an afterthought, lined with the kind of houses that have been renovated by people who actually live in them, the yards personal.
I have always liked East Nashville because it feels like a neighborhood that is still figuring out what it is, which I find comforting.
Fox knows the neighborhood better than I expect.
He points out a building on Russell Street that used to be a factory and is now home to artists’ studios, tells me about the 2010 flood and how the neighborhood responded, and about the community in it.
He knows this city the way I have always known it—as something living, something with a story under every surface—and I think: this is what we could have been. This is the version that was always available. Two people who love the same city, walking through it like it belongs to both of them.
When we get back into the car, guilt is pushing hard at me.
“Fox.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
Tell him now, Lucy, tell him the truth, right here, on this street, in the afternoon light, before it gets harder.
“Thank you,” I say, losing courage at the last minute. “For today.”
“It’s my pleasure.” Then he winks at me. “And it’s not over.”
When we get home, he opens the door, and I gasp.
There are flower arrangements, huge ones, in the living room, the kitchen, and on the dining table.
“Fox?”
He pulls me into his arms and kisses me. “Happy anniversary, sweetheart.”
Tears fill my eyes.
Never before has he made so much effort.
“Hey,” he murmurs.
I shake my head, pushing the tears back. “I…just…ah…you know, wish I remembered.”
God, I’m a horrible person! Here he is being so wonderful, and I’m lying my ass off to him.